Idea

Could Breathomics Be Used as a Marker of Aging?

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Jamila Aug 14, 2020

[1]Montuschi, Paolo, et al. "Increased 8-isoprostane, a marker of oxidative stress, in exhaled condensate of asthma patients." American journal of respiratory and critical care medicine 160.1 (1999): 216-220.

[2]Greulich, Timm, et al. "Obstructive sleep apnea patients can be identified by ion mobility spectrometry-derived smell prints of different biological materials." Journal of breath research 12.2 (2018): 026006.

[3]Sethi, Shneh, Ranjan Nanda, and Trinad Chakraborty. "Clinical application of volatile organic compound analysis for detecting infectious diseases." Clinical microbiology reviews 26.3 (2013): 462-475.

[4]O’Hara, M. E., et al. "Limonene in exhaled breath is elevated in hepatic encephalopathy." Journal of breath research 10.4 (2016): 046010.

aging

General comments

Juran K.3 months ago

Maybe dogs can help

I recently remembered the dogs sniffing out COVID-19 patients on airports and started to research. Apparently, some papers did preliminary research on dogs' ability to detect various types of cancers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_cancer_detection, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190408114304.htm). 

The most interesting one was a study on breath samples of cancer and non-cancer patients, where dogs identified lung cancer with a sensitivity of 71% and a specificity of 93% (https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2011/08/05/09031936.00051711.abstract?sid=b4c367ac-6264-4d94-8b46-2b1505bb3fcf). The whole sniffing dogs idea was based exactly on VOCs you mentioned, produced by the patient. As cancer is usually correlating with age, hopefully, the same method can be transposed to our session here.

So, it could be wise to pair up with Shubhankar Kulkarniand help the idea of defining the aging phenotype. To define the most important checkpoints of biological aging, people of different chronological age, with different (presumingly important) age-related disorders, whose biological age (BA) was previously estimated based on current methods, could be brought in for an experiment. Dogs should, from the urine, blood, or breath, be able to detect people falling into the same group or BA interval. 

If successful, that could be sort of a confirmation that our BA estimations actually work.
It would also mean that the breaths of these people have something in common and would be intuitive to do the breathomics right there.

If not successful, if dogs sorted the patients different from the current BA estimator, then we would have two clusterings of patients and could compare these two methods.

It's just an idea, not sure it would work. The experiment part should be planned wisely.

Shubhankar Kulkarni3 months ago

Shubhankar Kulkarni5 months ago

This is a great idea! Although studies focusing on healthy older subjects (greater than 50 years of age) have not yet identified any significant compounds or “breathprints”, [1] age-related diseases seem to have marker VOCs [2] . For now, probably the best way to go would be to list the VOCs for each of the age-related diseases and score them based on their frequency. We can use a threshold to identify the prominent ones and then check their levels / presence in older people and compare those with those in young adults.
References:
1. https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1806-37132016000200143&script=sci_arttext
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012816413600023X#:~:text=Acetone%2C%20ethanol%2C%20isoprene%2C%20isopropanol,healing%20progress%20in%20diabetes%20patients.

Darko Savic5 months ago

Could Breathomics Be Used as a Marker of Aging?

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